Tingler, The |
USA • 1959 • 82m •
   • Directed by: William Castle. • Starring: Vincent Price, Judith Evelyn, Darryl Hickman, Patricia Cutts, Pamela Lincoln, Philip Coolidge, Leon Alton, Richard Barthelmess, Gail Bonney, William Castle, Pat Colby, George DeNormand, Amy Fields. • Music by: Von Dexter.      A pathologist searches for the cause of a series of deaths and discovers that the victims have a large insect-like creature growing on their spinal chords. The creature attacks when the people are frightened and is only killed when the host emits a blood-curdling primal scream.
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Review:
During his conversation with Ollie it hit's Dr. Warren that the causes of the spinal damage to the persons executed is that they are so scared, to almost the point of death, of being killed and knowing that they'll be killed that something happens to them that causes their spines to snap from the oncoming terror. Dr.Warren deduces that the reason that this does not happen to most people on the outside is that unlike the prisoners who's fear is so strong and knowing that there's nothing that they can do to stop their demise they mostly keep from screaming as their strapped into the electric chair and executed trying to die with at least some courage and dignity.
Driving Ollie home Dr.Warren meets his wife Martha, Judith Evelyn, who's mute and later when Dr. Warren accidentally cut his hand when he drops a coffee cup she faints dead away at the sight of blood. All of a sudden it hit's Ollie that he just found a way to get rid of Martha, who he was trying to get rid of for a while and then get his hands on the movie-house, that they both own. and the large amount of money that she has hidden in a safe. Ollie plans to induce fear in Martha and knowing that fear without being neutralized by screaming, which Martha is unable to do, would produces a "Tingler", as Dr. Warren coined it, which would end up killing her.
Back home Dr.Warren tries to put the fear of God, as well as test his theory, into the heart of his cheating wife Isabel, Patricia Cutts, by pulling a gun on her and letting her have it which makes her drop and pass out cold from fright, there was only blanks in Dr. Warren's gun.
Taking X-rays while she was unconscious and the next day Dr.Warren and his assistant, David Morris, Darryl Hickman, looking at the X-rays see a strange and powerful object begin to appear on Isabel's spine which confirms Dr. Warren's theory about "The Tingler".
One of William Castle's best movies with Vincent Price acting as if he were doing Shakespeare at the Royal National Theater in London instead of acting in an American horror movie. Ollie goes through with his plan to murder Martha by inducing "The Tingler" in her but what Ollie did was release hell on Earth by doing it. In the end it does Ollie in when with the help of Dr Warren "The Tingler" is put back in the place, Martha's spine, where it came from and she comes back to "life" and scares Ollie to death.
Like most William Castle productions the movie audience is included in the movie by being made to scream their heads off when "The Tingler" gets loose in Ollie and Martha's movie-house in the movie. The noise of both the actors in the film and the theater audience is so loud that it not only can wake up people sleeping within a radius of some five miles from the theater but also the deaf and even the dead.
Review by sol from the Internet Movie Database.
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